Land Art as a Big-Data Climate Sensor

Understand

Robert Smithson's 1970 land artwork Spiral Jetty, located in the north arm of Utah's Great Salt Lake, has alternated between submergence and exposure during severe lake decline.

• We analyze 1,744 co-registered Landsat 4-9 and Sentinel-2 image chips spanning every year and calendar month from 1984 to 2025.
• A 14-feature complexity signature combines Shannon entropy, multiscale permutation entropy, fractal dimension, lacunarity, gray-level co-occurrence texture, intensity statistics, and ImageNet-pretrained ResNet50 features.
• These measurements are compared with a 42-year monthly climate and hydrology panel from NASA GISTEMP, USGS NWIS, Open-Meteo, and the Global Carbon Budget.